On Thursday, March 15 of 2012, Denver jumped into the free agent pool and came out clutching veteran free safety Mike Adams in its hooves. Was it the money or the atmosphere that brought him into the Broncos fold? According to Gray Caldwell, Michael ‘Pops’ Adams began by saying, “Nice to be here: the weather’s nice.”

It was your basic 70-degree March day in Denver. Happily, the Broncos signed him before the next traditional spring snowstorm rolled on in (and I’m sorry to hear about the late drought along the front range - all the best to those who were or are displaced by the forest fires that are plaguing that area). Regardless - one of the things that clinched his decision was the warmth within the facility, far more than the weather without. The coaching of John Fox went a long way toward greasing the wheels to a mutual agreement.

According to Adam Schefter, the Broncos re-signed punter Britton Colquitt, who is entering his third season with the team. Colquitt was an exclusive-rights free agent tendered last month at $540K, so this was a simple formality of Britton signing his tender.

Barring an unlikely extension, the 27-year-old member of the Colquitt family of punters will be a restricted free agent after the 2012 season.

Britton's 101 punts ranked second in the league in 2011, and his average of 47.4 yards per kick was seventh-best.

You know what has to be the dumbest habit of all relating to draft analysis? It's not the 40 mocks per writer, it's noting that Denver has the #25 pick, and then looking at every #25 pick in history as if that indicates some sort of precedent for what players can be found there. Here's an entire column devoted to precisely that sort of garbage. Look, Tom Brady was a sixth-rounder, while JaMarcus Russell was taken first overall. What else needs to be said?

Happy Tuesday, friends, and welcome to Part 4 of the ongoing series about the Peyton Manning offense. Today we’ll take our first step into the passing game, beginning with the key concepts that make up the three-step game. If you’ve missed any of the prior installments of the series, please feel free to catch up by following the appropriate links:

Every team runs some key three-step passing plays, which accomplish the goal of getting the ball in the hands of players in space by way of high-percentage completions. With an excellent QB like Peyton Manning, the three-step game is especially effective, because he’s so quick at identifying the best receiver to throw the ball to and then put it on the guy’s upfield shoulder, which allows him to immediately begin running after securing the catch.

Nike unveiled the new NFL jerseys for the 2012 season at an event in Brooklyn today. As expected, the Broncos will be switching back to orange as their primary uniform color, and the necklines of their jerseys also received a minor tweak (as did several other teams, it appears). Seattle was the only team whose uniforms underwent a significantoverhaul.

Good Morning, Broncos fans! In his latest column over at CHFF, Scott Kacsmar does his usual bang-up research job in examining the wide-ranging impact of Tim Tebow on the 2011 NFL season and the rest of the league going forward.

As Kacsmar tells it, Tebow's influence resulted in:

The Packers losing their bids at perfection and a SB repeat

Pittsburgh having to play in the only location where safety Ryan Clark would be unavailable

Denver doing the unthinkable in both pursuing and acquiring Peyton Manning, which of course set off a whole set of QB dominoes

Okay, so perhaps some of it is a reach, but it's a typically informative and entertaining read from Kacsmar, who even manages to tie the bounty scandal into the story.

After TJ cited Peyton Manning’s radio appearance on 104.3 last week, I spent some time thinking about what Manning had said. There’s no other way for me to put it - I feel like you've got to love Peyton’s approach in all of this. This is what other, lesser QBs should have brought to the table over the years - the unshakable desire to win, and a willing acceptance of their role in making it happen.

He's spoken of as one of the best of the best among QBs - and he is. He’ll be a first-ballot Hall of Famer, yet he’s essentially a soft-spoken man and he has a remarkable natural kindness to his mannerisms. He gives me the feeling that he’s someone who grew up in a good home and who has, himself, an unusual level of maturity. I’ve been privileged to have friends who have adult children like this, and the apples didn’t fall far from the tree. Simply put, the man has something that’s in unsettlingly short supply in our country of late - good manners. He's also both humble and incredibly hard working, yet he has the big ring to prove just how talented he is. He's a living antonym of the star player syndrome that is, at times, too easily present in the league and too often praised and cheered on in the community.

Good Morning, Broncos fans! Peter King thinks he thinks that he thinks it's interesting the Eagles and Chiefs are running A&M QB Ryan Tannehill through private workouts this week, but he believes the Dolphins (whose OC Mike Sherman was the QB's college head coach) and Browns are the likely landing spots for the prospect. Other MMQB factoidy thoughts:

Dolphins owner Stephen Ross now claims he didn't offer Jim Harbaugh the Miami gig, and that he didn't really want Peyton Manning. Guess Ross is learning from his counterpart in New Jersey...

PK finally got around to linking the Elway and Luck families, and he says Chris Mortensen had so many Manning scoops because of his close relationship with the QB, not because they share representation.

King wonders if Greg Schiano could someday be Bill Belichick's successor in New England, or has he forgotten about McHoodie? BTW, does Geraldo Rivera think Belichick and McDaniels are putting themselves in physical danger by wearing their thuggish apparel at practice and on the sideline during games? Hmm. Geraldo should have been an NFL reporter - he would have sniffed out Spygate and McDaniels's iffy personnel moves before anyone else, given their suspicious attire.

PK laudibly calls out the NFL for making an example of the Saints while their cash cow TV network glorifies vicious hits from days gone by, and he's hearing that Gregg Williams won't be appealing his suspension.

Good Morning, Broncos fans! We learned last summer that former Denver lineman and Pro Bowler Larry Kaminski plans to donate his brain to the Boston University group studying CTE and its occurence in football players. Kaminski now lives out in Washington, and spoke with his local paper about the physical toll of the game as he's experienced it:

At the end of the game ... I couldn't even bite down. It felt like somebody stuck a pencil in there or a knife or something because your jaw was so (out of) whack from getting hit so much.

I would wake up the next day and it was like I just left the battlefield and everybody had their heads off and I was carrying a sword with blood on it, and I said, 'What happened?' It was like I got into this darkness.

It looks to me like we were the prototype model to go out and find out how badly you can get beat up and then changed the design of the model or how it's used.

The league is trying to abandon a lot of us old-timers because they know there's a big liability.

Hello, friends, and welcome to Part 3 of our series about the Manning offense that we can expect to see in Denver. Today, we’ll focus on the running game, which I think will schematically have a lot of similarity to the base running game we’ve seen in Denver the past three seasons. The philosophy will be very different, though, and it’s on that aspect which I will dedicate most of my focus.

If you missed Parts 1 or 2, and want to catch up, please see these links:

Let’s begin by asking a simple question – why do football teams run the ball? The main answer that I would give is that it’s tradition. American football was invented in 1869, and the forward pass wasn’t introduced to the game until 1906. It actually was introduced as a safety measure, because a bunch of people got killed or seriously hurt playing the game in 1905, and President Teddy Roosevelt demanded rules changes. (The horror of government overreach!) The rules committee that was formed was the precursor of today’s NCAA.